Album Review: The Smile, Cutouts

Fans of Radiohead can feel rightly pissed off. The Oxford quintet’s last long-player, A Moon Shaped Pool, came out in 2016, with its predecessor a half-decade before that. Now that band’s two principals, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, together with jazz drummer Tom Skinner, have released their third album in as many years as The Smile.

However bad the fans feel, I’m guessing the other 60% of Radiohead are starting to wonder if they’ve been ghosted out of a day-job. Recorded during the same time-period as January’s Wall Of Eyes, Cutouts treads similar territory, with plenty of unusual time-signatures and math-rock elements, as the songwriters behind some of the catchiest rock music of the last three decades wilfully ignore conventional songwriting structures in favour of abstract, jazz-inflected jams.

The lovely ‘Instant Psalm’ is almost normal, arrangement-wise, but at this point we’ve become so used to The Smile’s left-turns that the first time I listened to it, I kept expecting a sudden time-change or the introduction of a Himalayan throat singer. Instead, we get quietly engulfed in waves of loveliness, augmented by sweeping strings courtesy of the London Contemporary Orchestra.

Elsewhere, abnormal service is resumed, from the electro-jazz of ‘Don’t Get Me Started’ to ‘Eyes & Mouth’, which welds weird time signatures to electronic arpeggios for an edgy ride. ‘Zero Sum’ is a frantic math-rock wig-out that sounds like being set upon by a swarm of angry wasps, while ‘The Slip’ is driven by a hypnotic, slinky bassline, with lyrics about black holes, and even some old-school jangly guitar riffs.

On ‘Tiptoe’, Yorke’s sweet falsetto is at odds with the darkness of the lyrics. “All of you appeasers and enablers,” he sings, “Eating scraps from the swill / As quietly as insects/ A toxic repetition”. Impressive, if frequently uneasy, listening.

7/10